Framed in pouring rain and darkness the mission style building was unspectacular, but inside the atmosphere was glowing and warm. Clinging to the front entrance was a paper sign that read “Breathe Owl Breathe show SOLD OUT,” but even at capacity The Woods felt spacious and breathable.
The Woods is a slow, small-scale venue with idyllic charm, which makes it suitable for cutesy-indie rock bands to flex their feathers and allow for the natural intricacies of their performance to be exposed. Likewise, the stage is diminutive, allowing for the audience-performer line of separation to dissolve almost completely – a detail that Breathe Owl Breathe took full advantage of. The stage was cluttered with tissue paper draped across tree branches and strung in wads along pieces of string hung from the ceiling, rendering an otherwise grown-up venue into an elementary school auditorium set up for a Lewis Carol play.
Little Wings is the meandering slipstream of cutesy-surreality produced by Florida native Kyle Field. In his songs, Field makes a point of decorating the ordinary with the abstract, creating a richly visual and humorous story within them. On stage, his mind is elsewhere, or at least what he sees before him is not a crowd of people staring back, but a flock of watercolor birds dressed in winter coats and dipping their beaks into glasses of foamy beer. “Whale Mountain” is a pensive, quiet, Will Oldham-esque ballad that captures the complex spirit of loss and the blunt observations of a child: “Put the past behind you, what a strange cartoon … so it’s no wonder you’ve written songs that everyone knows … you’ve traded your sweatshirt in for a leather … you can’t be a shepherd if you don’t have a flock, you can’t wear the shoe unless you put on the sock, there’s nothing to do but trade your stock, you can’t start the spark without a rock.” Field’s onstage demeanor is neither flighty nor self-conscious; it’s effortless self possession and a humble, subtle humor that the attentive fans of Breathe Owl Breathe immediately connect with.
Breathe Owl Breathe delivered another welcome onslaught of indie-cuteness, starting with the well-loved song about a wolf pup who shaves his face only to be unrecognized by his mother. The song is spoken by vocalist Micah Middaugh in sporadic lines suggestive of a dream narrative and is often accompanied by cellist/vocalist Andrea Moreno-Beals donning a fuzzy wolf hat and offering the microphone to said hat’s mouth. Though not a self-proclaimed children’s band, the compositions speak exclusively to the simple brilliance and imagination of youth; a characteristic both children and adults not entirely grown-up can take genuine (that is to say, un-ironic) interest in. Andrea’s operatic voice trembles occasionally in the background against the brushing percussion and the off-beat dipping-ascending chords of Micah’s guitar. Incorporating in-the-moment details like the glowing red “Exit” sign in the back of the room, Micah re-imagines it as a sunset above an ocean: “Wave back to the sunset…” he says while summoning the crowd to do the wave starting at the front of the room. The concepts are not unlike Little Wing’s in their tendency to couple starkly disparate images as in the song “Dragon” which features a fiery-bellied dragon working on his penmanship. The crowd is asked to scare the dragon with “fierce clapping” which ideally oscillates from one side of the audience to the other and then stops abruptly to offer a silent window for Micah to softly chant, “How do you stop loving someone?”
There is a distinct medieval and primordial theme in the lyrics, and when transposed to modern instrumentation the dynamic yet reticent creative capabilities of the composers burst forth and captivate.
The show concluded with a collective encore including Kyle Field of Little Wings, but not before Breathe Owl Breathe unofficially signed off by sneaking behind the tissue paper-clad branches and instigating a tissue-wad fight with the audience. I would recommend catching their show before they outgrow the venues that lend themselves to this kind of exclusive magic.
